LOVELAND, Colo. -- It's a huge win for Wal-Mart and a huge defeat for a workers' union. A group of Wal-Mart workers in Loveland voted overwhelmingly to reject a plan to unionize.

The workers at a Wal-Mart Tire & Lube Express voted 17-to-1 not to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

The vote however, has not discouraged the union. A spokesman with UFCW Local 7 said it will not give up its fight to get its foot in the door of a Wal-Mart store and that it will protest the results on grounds that none of its representatives were allowed to observe the election.

The worker who pushed for the vote said he has been harassed by other Wal-Mart employees.

"When I rolled into the polling area, an associate actually harassed me and threatened to beat me up and he's actually a Wal-Mart's 'observer,'" said Josh Noble, the Wal-Mart employee who led the effort to unionize.

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The union also accused Wal-Mart of adding workers to the Tire & Lube operation to dilute the strength of union support.

In November, nine of the 17 workers at the tire and lube department signed a petition asking for the opportunity to vote on union representation. But some of the workers have left the company and others apparently changed their mind in the past three months.

"There's been a tremendous amount of harassment, a tremendous amount of bullying, a tremendous of just scaring people to death. It's fear that won this election for election for Wal-Mart. It's fear that made this election go down," said Dave Minshall, a union spokesman.

The union said it will ask the National Labor Relations Board to set aside Friday's vote.

After the vote, Wal-Mart issued a statement saying, "Many of our associates are former members and they know better than anyone that the only guarantee a union can make is that it will cost members money and that is why workers rejected joining the union today."

Earlier this week, a labor rally was held in front of the store to show support for the union effort. Wal-Mart had tried to block Friday's vote, but the National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of the workers last month.

Wal-Mart argued that the tire and lube department is only one part of the store and isn't eligible for its own union. Supporters of a union say the workers are specially trained, and work in a separate area of the store.

If the employees had voted to unionize, it would have been the first Wal-Mart store in the nation to unionize a department.

This is just the third union vote ever to occur at a Wal-Mart store in the United States and the second time in two weeks that Wal-Mart workers have rejected the union. In New Castle, Pa., Wal-Mart tire and lube workers rejected the union 17-0 earlier this month.

Texas meatcutters held a union vote in 2000. Wal-Mart then eliminated that job throughout the company, but officials said it had nothing to do with the election.

Wal-Mart has announced plans to close a store in Quebec where workers had unionized, claiming that union demands were unreasonable and would have made it impossible to operate profitably.

That store will close in May. The workers at the Canadian store would have been the first to win a union contract with the giant discount retailer.

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